OpenStreetMap offers new registrants the option of inbound licensing their individual contributions under a public domain grant. This is not the default — the default remains the ODbL license.
OSM (ongoing) describes the background to this practice. However the same FAQ also states that:
If you declare your contributions to be in the Public Domain, you are thereby making a statement only. You will not actually be changing the license or what people can do with your data, because database law still overrides the protection of individual items.
If that is a reference to the European database directive 96/9/EC, then it is factually incorrect. That directive permits, and possibly even guarantees (Davidson 2008:125), the extraction and re‑utilization of insubstantial amounts. The notion of insubstantial has not been determined by case law but it could never drop to an “individual item”. It is even an open question whether the directive applies to crowd sourced databases (see 96/9/EC recital (41) for elucidation on who constitutes a database maker) — with my lay opinion that legal protection may well not apply to OpenStreetMap. (I’ll contact the OSM Foundation in due course after watching this discussion evolve.)
References
Davidson, Mark J (January 2008). The legal protection of databases. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978‑0‑521‑04945‑0. Paperback edition.
European Parliament and European Council (27 March 1996). “Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases”. Official Journal of the European Union. L 77: 20–28.
OSM (ongoing). Licence and Legal FAQ / Why would I want my contributions to be public domain. OpenStreetMap Foundation. Cambridge, United Kingdom. Access date 31 October 2019.
